Ron Gainer estimated he counted about 15 people, a half dozen vehicles and a trailer at the headquarters. The Bundy family had previously told OPB around 150 people had joined their cause at the refuge.

The Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, occupied by the Bundys and their supporters, lies roughly a half-hour south of Burns. It was established in 1908 by President Theodore Roosevelt, and is a popular place for birdwatching in the spring.

The occupiers draped an American flag over the welcome sign outside the refuge headquarters, and a pick-up blocked the road.

As the sun set Saturday, the temperature fell to 10 degrees. A group of five men bundled in coats and scarves fed sagebrush branches into a campfire. Only Ammon spoke to the media, but a few of the men quietly identified themselves as longtime residents of the Burns area and supporters of the Hammonds.

“We are not hurting anybody or damaging any property. We would expect that they understand that we have given them no reason to use lethal force upon us or any other force,” Bundy said.

Bundy said the men intend to use as little force as possible if law enforcement attempts to remove them from the site.

“We hope that they don’t try to do that. We are here and this is the people’s facility. It has been abused. This facility has been a tool to destroy ranchers and loggers and miners and many other individual’s rights. If they try to come and force that issue, then they make it about a building and facility and lives could be lost because of that,” he said.

The convictions were punishable by a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which followed the Oklahoma City bombing and other deadly acts of domestic terrorism. But on Oct. 30, 2012, U.S. District Judge Michael R. Hogan, presiding in his last sentencing before leaving the bench, said the Hammonds' conduct wasn't in keeping with the intentions of the law.

That law might apply, Hogan said, if someone intentionally burned sagebrush in the suburbs of Los Angeles, where fire can burn up ravines to houses.

"Out in the wilderness here, I don't think that's what Congress intended," the judge said. "I am not supposed to use the word 'fairness' in criminal law. I know that I had a criminal law professor a long time ago yell at me for doing that. And I don't do that. But this – it would be a sentence that would shock the conscience to me."

I don't have a problem with putting people in prison for setting (multiple) fires that spread to federal land. I don't even have a problem with the five-year sentence. But I do have a problem with prosecuting it under an antiterrorism law.

Course, if you want to make that point, maybe engaging in actual terrorism isn't your most effective option.

The prospect of hundreds of out-of-towners who openly carry firearms concerns some residents in Burns.

Fliers with the message “Militia go home” hang on signposts downtown.

Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward said he received death threat emails from people in other states after he told militia organizers he would not create a safe haven for the Hammonds to stay in Harney County.

“I haven’t slept a full night in close to two months now. I have a lot of anxiety,” he said. But Sheriff Ward wants to protect his county.

“What we’ve been threatened with here is civil unrest and the insinuations of armed rebellion,” said Sheriff Ward.

Cliven Bundy said if Sheriff Ward wanted to keep the protests away, he should have worked harder to get the Hammonds’ sentences reduced or vacated. “I believe that the local governments have failed these people,” Bundy said. “The sheriff, he has the duty to protect the life, liberty and property of his citizens. And I believe he has failed, totally here.”

Bundy told OPB the protest is meant to draw attention to the expanding power of federal and state governments, and that his sons are going, “for a good purpose.”

Even Bundy is unsure whether the protest is a good idea, and whether it’s proper for his family’s supporters to get involved. “I don’t quite understand how much they’re going to accomplish,” Bundy said. “I think of it this way: what business does the Bundy family have in Harney County, Oregon?”

“In one sense, I believe very much in local government, and local control, and local authority,” Sheriff Ward said. To him, the militiamen are welcome to protest. But he doesn’t want to see the rally escalate. “We cannot have what happened at the Bundy Ranch here,” Ward said. “I won’t allow it from law enforcement and I won’t have it from citizens.”

Sounds like it's a powder keg and things could get really ugly fast. On the other hand, it sounds like law enforcement is ready to wait and see and give things a chance to de-escalate, because, y'know, white people.

Yeah, city and state cops are generally really racist and and really incompetent. The feds might not be significantly less racist, but they're at least a lot smarter about it. Don't want to fuel the people looking to repeat Waco.

のほも is such a good word?? the concept is kind of hard to fully get across in translation, but basically it means a feeling of pure, deep, platonic affection, and i think thats beautiful

I'm trying to find the Daily Show video where a policeman encounters an angry, drunken white man waving a rifle around, then the man proceeds to whip his dick out and start waving it at the policeman, whose reaction is...to speak calmly with the man and sit him down for a chat.

Speaking of The Daily Show, Noah's back from vacation tomorrow, and so are Colbert and Wilmore. I expect they will be giving this story much better coverage than the news media have.

It's got a little bit more detail on what the Bundys have said, which...yeah, about what you'd expect. Unreasonable demands that are clearly not going to be met (they want the federal government to surrender the wildlife refuge), threats to keep up the occupation for years, and, yes, more veiled threats that they're ready for a standoff.

I like this bit in particular:

Ammon Bundy met with Dwight Hammond and his wife in November, seeking a way to keep the elderly rancher from having to surrender for prison. The Hammonds professed through their attorneys that they had no interest in ignoring the order to report for prison.

Ammon Bundy said the goal is to turn over federal land to local ranchers, loggers and miners. He said he met with 10 or so residents in Burns on Friday to try to recruit them, but they declined.Burns Protest Marchers including militia and local residents Saturday head for the Harney County Courthouse as part of a protest against government.

"We went to the local communities and presented it many times and to many different people," he said. "They were not strong enough to make the stand. So many individuals across the United States and in Oregon are making this stand. We hope they will grab onto this and realize that it's been happening."

Motherfucker, the people who actually live there want nothing to do with you. Including the specific people you actually claim to be advocating for.

Thanks for the link; I'd seen Doctorow mention those allegations (and that's what I was alluding to with my "leans too much to advocacy for the Hammonds" remark) but I hadn't seen a source so I didn't bring it up.

Again, I've got no problem with putting these guys away, but I DO have a problem with the federal government's misuse* of anti-terror laws, and with minimum sentences on principle. These things are threats to everybody, not just assholes.

* I suspect that Ken White would interject, at this point, that this is not misuse at all, that the laws are being used for their intended purpose, but that the government likes to put "anti-terror", "anti-drug", or "protecting children" in front of laws that it actually intends to use for other purposes.

Or so the public won't notice that it's overreaching legislation because it says it's for fighting terrorists/drugs/protecting children.

The two things are not mutually exclusive, of course. The easiest way to get the public to willingly give more power to the government is to identify something the public is afraid of, and say that this law will help protect them from that scary thing.

Drugs worked pretty well from the 1970's through the 1990's. Terrorism became the go-to excuse in 2001, for obvious reasons. (The 1996 act would have been in response to homegrown terrorists like McVeigh and Kaczynski, of course, rather than the organized foreign terror groups that are today's boogeyman.)

I guess the good news is that people are finally starting to wise up about the Drug War. I'll take what I can get.

Oooh, we should send them Durian. To quote Sir David Attenborough: "I have to say. The smell, to my nostrils at any rate, is fairly disgusting. An open sewer with just a dash of coal gas would be a fair description."

That's a good story to test perspective / bias on. Sure, it was an armed anti-government militia group and the FBI, not local cops. But I was positive I knew the story before I even clicked the link, but there's still a chance it may have been the cops that fired first.